Retail establishments such as supermarkets and the like have for many years attracted customers by offering weekly specials or sale items at reduced prices and advertising such items on paperboard or paper placards mounted to the store windows. The placards were ephemeral, being generally displayed for no longer that one or two weeks.
Many systems have heretofore been employed for mounting such placards. The use of tape to mount the placards to the window was accompanied by significant disadvantages. The tape left residue on the windows necessitating arduous cleaning. Employees encountered difficulty in mounting the placards in proper vertical position, especially when the window locations were relatively high and ladders or other devices were required. Often, two placards were placed in back-to-back relationship so that the same offering was visible to both prospective purchasers outside and inside the store premises. Extensive difficulties were therefore encountered in aligning and registering back-to-back placards while mounting them to the store windows.
In addition, the use of tape to mount placards in store windows resulted in unsightly and often irregularly shaped pieces of mounting tape.
Attempts to provide alternate devices for mounting placards, including the use of suspended wires, also resulted in an unsightly appearance and did not facilitate the rapid and neat mounting of frequently changed placards.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,258,493 a display support for holding signs was disclosed. The support included a folded over flexible backing band. A pressure sensitive adhesive layer was utilized to mount the band to a store window and the band was folded over to carry a sign between a pair of magnets mounted to the inner faces of the band. While this device did serve to provide a magnetic mount for replaceable signs, it did not gain widespread acceptance due to a variety of factors. Initially, the appearance presented from the outside of the window was unsightly, and the pressure sensitive adhesive layer was visually exposed and its function evident, apparent and unconcealed.
The folded over band was subject to cracks and failure due to fatigue after repeated usage. In addition, if a portion of the band were utilized to carry indicia, the band was so configured that the indicia on the support detracted from the usable area of any sign which was being supported between the magnets. Thus, to fully utilize a rectangular sign area, consideration as to the space required by the folded over band must be taken in account and, in addition, a proper correlation between any indicia on the band and indicia on the suspended sign was required.